Intergenerational Paper Aquirement

Paper leads to googling old addresses in Philadelphia PA. 

 

Over the past few months I’ve been helping my mom clean out stuff from her house. Since she’s lived in that house for almost fifty years, things are stuck in every corner of the place. I bring in empty boxes and take out full boxes. I bring in plastic totes and then stack them over there. It feels like a process that’s going to continue forever. While it seems we’ve accomplished a lot in this process, piles tend to pop up in other rooms after disappearing in the first one. There’s less in the house. I know we’ve made progress…I think.

My main job is to do something with my dad’s books. Most of books I bought for him. He wasn’t great at telling me exactly what he wanted to read, but I chose things that might work. Mostly I bought books about war and men in war…and war and guts and blood and stuff. No novels! Anything painfully specific about World War II would normally work. That could be able some mission in North African or Japanese prison camps in Southeast Asia. If I found those at a thrift store then I bought them. Maybe he’d read them, and maybe they’d get stacked up in the back room. I did this for years and the stacks got bigger and bigger.

Then there were the books that he had acquired on his own. Some of them were random books he told me he bought in New Orleans at one of those books by the pound places. He had a whole set of encyclopedias from 1915 as well as a set about American authors. They looked nice but they weren’t of much interest to him. You didn’t actually read them you looked at them. When I was a kid and playing in that back room, I remember incorporating them into my play. They were great for making buildings for my GI Joe’s.

Lastly there were the books that were handed down to him. These were clearly older than the rest, some of them going back to the middle part of the 19^th century. Flipping through one of them, I noticed my grandmother’s maiden name written in one. It was a children’s book from what I assume is the 1920’s or early 1930’s. Clearly, she hadn’t written her name in the book. It was a fancy calligraphy type of printing. No child could have wielded a pen in this fashion, no way. It was odd seeing her name in the book in the exact way I’d seen names printed in anonymous books for years. So much of my time has been spent going through mold ravaged tomes, and none of those people have been related to me. When I saw her name in the book I paused, and put that one off to the side. I’ll keep that one.

While I love books and spend most of my time moving them around the world, they’re not always unique. Looking through old things, especially old things from my parents’ house, I’ve looked for personal items. My dad wasn’t one to have a dream journal or a notebook full of random notes, but I’ve found scribblings on pieces of paper. He had terrible handwriting.

Out of all the piles I took to my car and then “processed,” (donate, moved upstairs, kept or ripped up) I came across something from my dad’s uncle, my great-uncle, Ken. Ken was a unique, fidgety guy that came from the exotic land of Cape May New Jersey. He lived most of his life with my great-aunt (my grandmother’s sister) in a house in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. When the two of them retired they moved into my great grandparents’ house (the one my great aunt grew up in) in Lexington North Carolina.

Ken collected stamps and things related to mail. When someone was born, he made a book of stamps for them, or at least he did for me as well as my father. I have mine at my house. My great aunt sent postcards. Before I got involved in mail art, I sent postcards a lot of unadorned postcards, many of which went to her at the ancestral manse in Lexington.

Obviously, I ended up with my dad’s book of stamps and other postal ephemera. I didn’t ask my mom if I could take it, but I didn’t figure she’d mind. It was one less thing she had to account for, something I doubt she had ever looked at. The book ended up in the back of my car and then made its way upstairs where I got a closer look.

There were two books. One book was just “First Day of Issue” stamps. I came across a bunch of these many years ago, some that were at least eighty years old. Worried I was cutting up something of value I did a little sleuthing and found no one really collected them anymore. At best they were going for a dollar. I cut those up. Outside of the first day of issues were some un-cancelled postcards, maybe twenty or thirty. Although these can be redeemed for the value on the front, someone would still have to put extra postage on them to get to today’s rates. All of those will go to Richard in Illinois. He uses those all the time. I even found a postcard sent to my great-grandparents from the 1970’s.

The most intriguing part of the collection were the un-cancelled stamps with the years they were issued in chronological order. They started in 1969. The book I was given started in the year of my birth, 1981. While I like the look of these books, I’m more interested in the practical use of the stamps. Shit’s expensive! In other words, what I saw was “free postage.” After all, I had a stack of things that needed to go out but didn’t have any stamps. All I had to do was transfer the stamps over and then drop them in one of those blue boxes. I sat there and thought. I flipped to the next page, more stamps. The collection went for about twenty years. Dozens of dollars of stamps right there for the taking.

I was looking at these books on my desk. The stamp books were surrounded by reminders of the thousands of hours I’d spent making my weird things. After peering around the room, I looked a little closer at his creation. This was his passion, a passion that somehow ended up on my desk almost sixty years later. In no way could I break that up. No way could I toss out or use up such a creation, such a beautiful collection. Unfortunately, this is a conundrum that someone will have to work through for all of my bullshit. I have thousands of pages of written things, collages, handmade books…not counting all of the non-personal items. Books, DVD’s, and weird pieces of paper with faces of rock starts on them. What do they toss out and what do they keep? How do I tell someone decades from now what is important and what they can quickly toss in the trash or drop off at Goodwill? Intergenerational paper acquirement keeps running downhill. I feel sorry for that next poor-bastard to deal with my shit. Sorry Miles.

My response to all of this was to investigate and then make more stuff (paper) from my inquisitiveness. One of the cards in the book of mail ephemera sent to my dad, had my great aunt and uncle’s address in Philadelphia on it. Strangely, I’ve retained the street name, it’s never left me although I haven’t been there in thirty years. When I was 12 or 13 I went to visit them in Philadelphia one summer. The three of us ran around the city for a week. They were great hosts, we went to museums and even to a minor league baseball game in Redding. It seems the Phillies were out of town the whole week.  I distinctly remember the kitchen that overlooked the street out front. At the time it felt like I was in the busiest city in the world. When I looked out the front window at my parents’ house, all I saw were a couple semi-manicured fields. In my 12 year old brain, looking out that kitchen window in Philly I saw an urban metropolis. In my 44 year old brain, I was in a post-war suburb of Northeastern row-houses. While it was exponentially more urban than what I came from, this was not really the city. This was the place where middle class people went to to avoid the city. It was a place they could have cars and a small yard. I loved looking out that kitchen window. Caroline often had the window open in the morning, the traffic screeching down the street. Periodically the sound of a city bus would come rumbling by. Who knows, I might have even been treated to a gunshot while trying to go to sleep: a sound that connected both the city and the country for me. One night, while I was sleeping in the back TV room, I thought someone was in the house. I remember staying very still on that fold out mattress. I don’t know how long I was frozen for, but I realized the sound was coming from the nearby neighbors, something I had never experienced before.

There’s gold in them thar paper. Pieces lead to pieces, story to story, and then…more paper. Add the postage and move along. I hope this story fits nicely in a pile in an unused part of your house.  

 

Mail Art Futility...and Tacos

Go ahead and send them mail, they make great food.

 

There’s a consistent feeling of futility in mail art.

Often mail artists create projects that no one is interested in. That includes other mail artists. The more excited I am about a project, the less interest I receive. Proud of something you’ve made, want to share it with the world, collective shrugs all around. Mail artists send out four or five times the amount of mail than what we receive. (At least the super active ones). What’s sent back to you consists mostly of pictures cut out from ten year old magazines. Although mail artists relish the correspondents that imbue their work with personality and creativity, these are few and far between. I still send to the magazine cutters with regularity, though, it’s what I was taught to do.

While I never feel like I’m going to quit making things, I often have the feeling of quitting mail art. Not sure what that means, not sure who I turn in my resignation letter to, but I have that feeling at least once a year. I do nothing about it. Since 2009 I’ve never stopped creating and then sending more and more stuff. Each year I mail at least 300 things to mail artists, not including random mailings to weird addresses or to friends and family. In a given year I send at least 500-600 individual pieces that cost me hundreds of dollars, most of which are just pissed into the wind. Spending hundreds on stamps is still a lot more respectable than engaging in some midlife crisis activity. Golf...for example.

It’s the mail artist’s paradox. When you send things out you cannot expect much of a response. You cannot expect anyone to engage with the thing in any public way. If someone finds joy or excitement in your creation, you rarely know about it. This is fine 90% of the time for me. I know the game. I know how things work. I know what to expect but that 10% will always creep back in.

And then you walk into a Mexican restaurant in Mocksville North Carolina and that feeling of mail art futility is completely erased.

Let me back up. I teach at a community college. We have a main campus in Lexington North Carolina, where I spend most of my time, and then a campus at a smaller town called Mocksville North Carolina. The latter is most famous for being the final resting place for Daniel Boone’s parents, Squire and Sarah, and also the birthplace of my paternal grandfather, James. It’s a town of 6,000 people. In Mocksville, I like going to a couple thrift stores and this one Mexican restaurant. No idea how I found it, but I did and started going every time I was teaching in town. It was a surprise gem. During one semester, I went through most of their menu, thinking their verdes enchiladas were the best thing on the menu. I told anyone about the place that I could. I made my wife go. I made friends make a special trip. It was that good. One day, while sitting at in my office, I made a quick broadside. I printed off a ton of these and then mailed them over the course of a few months.

When I walked in the Taco Shop this week, they had taped one of the broadsides I made to the wall directly behind the cash register. Some delightful mail artist, a solid human, sent them that broadside through the mail. It could have come from anywhere. It might have been mailed from Kansas or Japan, I don’t know and I never will.

At first I didn’t notice that it was there, I was too focused on the electronic menu to the right. When I saw it I smiled. I tried to take a picture of it on the wall but I didn’t want to get caught. Getting caught would have taken away some of the fun. I can only imagine what they thought about it when they received it. The mail artist might not have put it any context to their mail. If it showed up without a note, without a reason for it being sent, the people at the shop might have shook their head in confusion. All of those questions, all of those thoughts immediately evaporated the futility I felt that exact moment in making and then sending piece after piece.

Albertsthal Book of Broadsides \ Punk Flyers

Most of what I end up creating is a type of a list. A list of words or either a collection of pieces of paper stuck together. Clearly, I’m not good with transitions. I can’t really keep together a longer narrative so I try and stay away from that. My stories are short and jump from day to day, from event to event. Collages might have a face over there, but they’re not directly connected to the rest of the piece. Not really a criticism of my own work, just a statement of fact. While I write and make collages in some form almost every day, I often see them as separate things. I might write about collage, but I rarely have a lot of writing in a collage…a word or two, but not a story. Once again, no long cohesive narrative. 

A fun cover.

 

I didn’t connect the writing and the collage until recently. Like most things, it just happened, no real forethought. It came together in a book of 32 broadsides (I use this or punk flyers interchangeably, who cares?) that mix words and collage. The words are some play on a central idea, an asinine premise, or a smarmy comment. I embellish on that idea based on a found image that somewhat corresponds to the words. Put them together and someone will try and make a connection. The images are ones that I have constantly looked for in tossed out books, magazines, and random pieces of nothing. They’re always in black and white, or at least made into black and white. Monochrome! Most are line drawings. Many of the images are slightly surreal. For years I have looked for these images, scanned them, and then saved them on my computer. I have thousands of such images.

What further connected the writing and the collage, was a font called “albertsthal typewriter.” It looks nice, slightly clean, but not too clean. I guess I found it during one my dafont.com “shopping” sprees. I like to go there every few months and download a bunch of new fonts to play with. I made one broadside mixing writing, collage, a found image, and this particular font together. I made another, and another. Pretty soon, it looked like I had a narrative going, albeit a crazy and unhinged stream of conscious one, but a narrative nonetheless. I did this over and over again, making a couple a day over the course of a few weeks. When I stopped, I looked back at all of the images I saw a connection between all of them. At least it’s a snapshot of the random things I was thinking during this particular time. There was personal stuff in there, jokes, political things, surreal nonsense, and just stupidity. Maybe it’s my 2025 autobiography?

I was doing all of this right at the same time I was finishing up my Because No One Asked for It book. Since that was mostly clerical work, trying to get people to pay for things and what not, it wasn’t creatively taxing. The timing was strange, but they both benefitted one another. It looked like I was being very creative. During my monthly online mail-art meeting, when I mentioned the albertsthal book, someone actually said in the background, “Another book?” The money left over from the longer book, was used to print up nice copies of the albertsthal one. All I had to pay for was shipping. The work for one paid off in the other. 

 

While I enjoyed making the thing and I think it’s something that’s new for me, I wasn’t super happy about it when it showed up. It didn’t look like I wanted it to. My technical abilities are poor and my interest moves quickly, so it’s not a big deal. I made up 25 envelopes and mailed them off all at one time. I didn’t make an announcement for the new book, and I don’t expect any money to come of it. I’ve posted a few images from the thing, my favorite images. All 32 are collected in a book while some of my favorites will be printed into broadsides and mailed with my usual stuff. I also have tried to cut a few corners, by making some half-sized zines from them. These are quick and easy to print. I’ll send them out as my regular mail-art to whoever I need to send to next. If anyone is interested in a zine copy (the professionally printed ones are gone) I’ll send you one. 

Five images that appear in the book.

 

My copies will be printed from a PDF file. Whenever you open a PDF file, you have an option to use AI. You can ask the robot questions. Although I think AI can end up being the downfall of our society, causing the robots to rise up and destroy humans, it’s also neat. Why not ask the robot what the file is about? The answer I got was frightening accurate, insightful even.

Here’s what he robot said.

This document is a chaotic, satirical, and absurd collection of fragmented thoughts, humorous commentary, and nonsensical advice. ​ It touches on various topics, including coping mechanisms for daily frustrations, bizarre product ideas, critiques of humanity, and random musings about life, music, and aging. Key themes include:

1. Coping with Annoyances: Suggestions like covering your nose to avoid bad smells, scratching your eyes instead of poking them, and wearing a mask to block human interactions. ​
2. Fashion and Consumerism: Random mentions of clothing preferences, deals, and critiques of societal norms. ​
3. Satirical Advice: Tips for leaving work early, looking busy, avoiding coworkers, and using children as excuses. ​
4. Music and Morality: A humorous critique of rock and roll, dancing, and joy, linking them to moral decline and absurd warnings about "genital playing." ​
5. Aging and Old Man Smell: Satirical advice on preventing "old man stink" through wardrobe changes and physical trauma.
6. Random Observations: Commentary on melons, soup season, shame in America, and absurd musings about life and death.
7. Mockery of Religion and Politics: Mentions of "Republican Jesus," critiques of societal norms, and exaggerated moral warnings.
8. Absurd Humor: The document is filled with nonsensical phrases, surreal imagery, and over-the-top satire. ​

Overall, the document is a stream-of-consciousness-style parody of modern life, blending humor, absurdity, and social critique. It lacks coherence but offers a glimpse into a bizarre and exaggerated worldview. ​